Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Thursday September 01, 2011 @10:00AM
from the vps-just-wanna-have-fun-man dept.

rtfa-troll writes "A picture of vodka fountains, indefinite amounts of Jaegermeister, and sexual harassment is emerging from Microsoft. The former second in command at Microsoft UK was accused of sexual misconduct involving at least five separate women. A Microsoft internal investigation was unable to prove the allegations but decided to fire Simon Negus for having 'behaved dishonestly, and thereby acted in a manner calculated or likely to destroy trust and confidence between him and Microsoft' and sue him £75k. Now Negus, who already has a new job as COO at Upstream Systems has struck back with a £10 million false dismissal suit alleging a culture of drunken parties and claiming that other (Male) management at Microsoft were so drunk they followed a female Microsoft UK manager into the ladies' lavatories. I guess we can now guess why senior managers go away to Microsoft vowing never to buy anything and come back with signed contracts; presumably it was just lying there next to them in the morning and they were too afraid to ask what happened."

One thing that consistently seems to happen at startups is that once they have more than a dozen or so people, there's a Friday afternoon beer party, and when the company gets up to 100-200 people they hire a professional HR department, whose first move is to kill the beer party.

But also, this is the UK Microsoft, and apparently it's more socially acceptable to get ripping drunk in the UK than it is in the US.

I used to work for a large multi-national (Australian division) where we used to have quite a few senior managers from the UK.

While Australians have a reputation for hard drinking, the UK guys would typically start earlier, go longer and get totally wrecked. Then be up the next morning roaring to go. I remember at one work event we were informed that the company would no longer be welcome to book accomodation at that venue because someone decided around midnight to start playing carpet bowls in the lounge a

I'm a pretty big Microsoft hater but I have to say I totally agree with you.

People with any kind of power will abuse it and men often abuse their position to get female attention. The women who flirt with the boss get good reviews, the women that sleep with the boss get big pay raises, the ones that have their kids get jobs for life on pay they could not otherwise justify. It happens everywhere just like fiddling expenses and booking extra flights to collect air miles. It's not seen as wrong until someone s

Speaking of "reporting", anyone find it odd that a search for Simon Negus on MSNBC [msnbc.com] returns no results? The Bing [bing.com] page shows mostly non-scandal related links (only two "negative" articles on the first two pages). Filtering results maybe?

Well, actually the first article says that it was an annual sales conference, and generally you'd notice everyone even mentioned is a manager or HR consultant or such. E.g., the woman he asked to flutter her eyelashes is apparently a HR consultant, at a quick googling.

What? Did you think they had parties with unlimited vodka and JÃgermeister for the peons?

So unless you were some sales manager or such, yeah, probably you wouldn't see that happening at any company you worked for, or even at MS. They're not going to do that for the likes of YOU, of course.

Never seen that happening in Europe. To me you are responsible for what you do. It is not as if people are forced to drink. Blaming the company and/or the alcohol is like blaming the girl for wearing a short dress.

Sorry for the rape, but it was because...

No! It was because the rapist is a complete idiot who should be put away for a long time and then some.

The logic goes something along the lines of the Employer is legally responisble for providing a safe work environment, free from threat of phyisical injury, bullying or harrasment. As the function is arranged and funded by the employer, it is considered an extension of the workplace, and all workplace protection responsibilities apply.

That's not to say that if someone criminally assulted someone else they wouldn't be held personally responsible in the eyes of the law. But an employer could potentially be se

What? Did you think they had parties with unlimited vodka and JÃfgermeister for the peons?

I'm a developer but a bit more outgoing than your average bunch of devs. And it's my experience that there is a large part of this group that doesn't even want to go to a party with girls, even if you tell them it's all paid for.

It's not just internal. When I went on a trip to Reading in a previous job where they were showing off new server technologies they had hired good time girls there too to basically act as eye candy for all the people they were trying to tie in to a future with Microsoft tech.

But let's also be honest, Microsoft is far from unique here, it's not fair to single them out over it, really, it's a problem with corporate sales and marketing culture across many industries.

Microsoft and Intel have thrown some legendary parties at Supercomputing. In 2006, they rented an entire Mall in Tampa. Free food and drink (Pretty much anything you wanted, They wouldn't hand out 20 year old scotch I'm sure, but I specifically remember having a Bombay Sapphire martini), live music, probably more than a thousand people. It was an amazing time, but I'm told that it paled in comparison to some previous years. There's no doubt Redmond knows how to throw a party.

If you get high enough up in a company, you can do whatever you want, get in whatever trouble you want, and some smaller company will always hire you.
Another recent(ish?) example I can think of is Mark Hurd from HP, Oracle immediately gave him a job.

If you get high enough up in a company, you can do whatever you want, get in whatever trouble you want, and some smaller company will always hire you.Another recent(ish?) example I can think of is Mark Hurd from HP, Oracle immediately gave him a job.

If you get high enough up in a company, you can do whatever you want, get in whatever trouble you want, and some smaller company will always hire you.
Another recent(ish?) example I can think of is Mark Hurd from HP, Oracle immediately gave him a job.

The old boys club. It's killing industry worldwide.

Nope, it's the reward for building a ladder of other people's bodies to climb your way to the top.

Hurd's misdemeanours seem to have been very minor. Outsiders might speculate that he trod on toes and was forced out. His successor has managed to wipe billions off the share price and royally piss off the distributors way ahead of any spin off, which might be seen as very much worse.

Now Oracle has acquired a man who knows HP and probably would like nothing better than to move into the president's office after the cheap Oracle takeover and start firing some people. It is a terrible way to run business, but

For a start, Hurd wiped out almost all R&D. Which is pretty much guaranteed to boost stock in the short run by reducing costs. It also usually signals the spiral into death or becoming an irrelevant a me-too OEM for a tech company.

He also managed to drag the morale into the fucking ground, pretty much. And managed come across as a huge hypocrite by posing as cutting even his own salary in his quest to slash everyone else's... but have his compensation raised by the exact same am

It's exactly this response that worried me when I posted. But then I thought that they might get some decent people out of this, but the average will be a bunch of drunks and will pull the company down more than enough.

I'm not aware of many IT employees that turn down free alcohol. I can count one part-time guy in my entire career of the top of my head, and he was the one who was planning to go into the seminary when he finished his undergraduate degree.

In short, it's not many people. There's a few practical declines (designated driver, pregnancy), a few muslims who don't drink out of religious convictions and a few others, but the vast majority of people in all walks of like will have a few free beers or glasses of wine. Not everyone is looking to get drunk on the company's bill though, but there's usually someone who does. They don't all try to flirt, and most do it in a way that's not sexual harassment. But does it happen? Yes, probably.

There's a good reason the employer is responsible and the club is not. First, some random drunk guy in a club can't threaten employment consequences against women who turn him down. Second (and closely related), the club didn't hire the guy to represent them and then grant him the authority to affect the future employment of the people he harassed.

At a previous job, we had a guy in our group who didn't drink, and was always convenient as a designated driver. There are enough techies around who aren't neurotypical or otherwise don't drink because they don't like having their heads messed with, or who don't drink because they had alcoholics in their family and don't want to go there. There are also people who don't drink because they used to be alcoholics, though I ran into that more often with sales people and cops than with techies. Also, when I

Negus...has struck back with a £10 million false dismissal suit alleging a culture of drunken parties and claiming that other (Male) management at Microsoft were so drunk they followed a female Microsoft UK manager into the ladies' lavatories.

So because someone else acted improperly, he thinks it was OK for him to do so too? I hope he gets laughed out of court.

Negus...has struck back with a £10 million false dismissal suit alleging a culture of drunken parties and claiming that other (Male) management at Microsoft were so drunk they followed a female Microsoft UK manager into the ladies' lavatories.

So because someone else acted improperly, he thinks it was OK for him to do so too? I hope he gets laughed out of court.

Did you miss the part of the article where he denied the accusations against him? Or the one where the investigation turned out no proof of the allegations?

He's not saying, "everybody else was acting improperly, so it was ok for me to do it." He's saying, "I was acting properly amidst massive impropriety. If anything, they fired me because I wasn't playing along."

Whether you believe him or not is moot. The question is, can he prove his allegations while Microsoft can't prove theirs? If that's the case, not only should this not be dismissed, but he should win.

If he's high up enough, then what his subordinates do *is* his problem. More likely though he's just a sociopath (like many higher ups in major companies) so he's just lying through his teeth to save credibility for future victims.

This will continue until he becomes convinced of his own invincibility and cocks it up royally enough to get the attention of the police and thrown in jail.

I like how you assumed he's guilty based on mere allegations. Nice. We shall achieve our feminist utopia one day sister, and all men will either grovel at our feel (but not close enough that they may look up our skirts) or hang by their neck from a tree (by not high enough that they can see down our shirts)!

Even though knowing this isn't an uncommon practice at the corporate level it still makes me a little sick to read about the shameless expense fund. The harassment allegations almost seem like a secondary grievance.

A woman I knew who worked at Microsoft in Brazil was told that her husband couldn't be covered on her health insurance, even though male employees' wives were all covered by their husbands' Microsoft-provided policies. When she started to say that was unfair, she was told to back off. I guess sexism at Microsoft is a worldwide thing.

Take a flat tire on a moonless night for instance. While a man is out changing nuts and bolts and doing all manner of screwing on the side of the road, will a woman so much as think to grab a flashlight and help? No.

Let me guess, everything you learned about women you learned on TV [youtube.com]? And you're still single you say? Marvelous, simply marvelous.

Many years ago I was playing in a Macho women with Guns game at a RP convention and I had a character who in the initial part of the adventure was determine to be too stupid to be trusted with a gun, so she was given a flashlight.

Over the course of the module she found that anything she shone the toch on died (because the other characters shot it), so when we were gearing up for the ultimate encounter and she was finally told she could have any weapon she wanted, she asked for a portable floodlight.

Wearing a short skirt is not appropriate, it makes men uncomfortable too. The door swings in both directions.

Appropriate is a matter of cultural choice. There have been many cultures where wondering around naked was fine. If you want your women to be invisible head to toe then you are making a sick and really sad cultural choice. It's people like you who make the office environment more boring and uniform. Worse, it's fundamentally a snobbish discrimination which picks a certain middle class dress and defines it as "appropriate" and then makes the others have to try (and inevitably, in small details fail) to c

Poor baby. Sucks to be you, huh? Not once in your life, has a (actually, more than ten in my lifetime) woman grabbed you in a bar, and told you, "You're going home with me tonight!" Nor, have you ever experienced a (different) woman dragging you to the bedroom, saying "Gotta make hay while the sun shines", totally ignoring your protests that you need a shower. You can't find a woman who DEMANDS to have your baby? Damn. Sometimes I think life sucks but it would REALLY suck to be you! Everyone has thei

Take a flat tire on a moonless night for instance. While a man is out changing nuts and bolts and doing all manner of screwing on the side of the road, will a woman so much as think to grab a flashlight and help? No.

If he's already doing all manner of screwing on the side of a road, having a women grab a flashlight and do whatever with it would not be necessary or helpful; in fact it could be very painful.

Why isn't this modded up as funny? This is a fantastic, stream-of-consciousness pile of awesome. For my money, it doesn't get any better than when Michael Bolton sings, "That's because women hate holding flashlights, because they are complete rubbish at it."

For men sex is a whole different kind of thing. And flirting and such serves another purpose or goal for each sex.

As a man, for me, sex is always emotional... perhaps I'm odd, but having sex with someone, even one night stands, generally means something. And I have done the seemingly "meaningless" one night stands quite a few times, and I've got a lot out of them - not just the sex. I can't think of one time I've had sex when I didn't like the person I was having sex with. YMMV.